Immediately
after World War II, unemployment in France was extremely high.
In an effort to lure Russian émigrés back to the homeland,
the Soviet Union promised employment, food, shelter, and amnesty,
and some naïve Russians returned. The fate of one such Russian
and his family is the focus of East-West, a
1999 French film under the title Est-Ouest directed by Régis
Wargnier that began its Los Angeles run in April 2000. France
and the Soviet Union were wartime allies, and the perception
among some French leftists was that the Soviet Union offered
a better life than capitalist worker exploitation in France.
Accordingly, Alexei Golovin (played by Oleg Menshikov) took
his wife Marie (played by Sandrine Bonnaire) and his son Seryozha
(played by Ruben Tupiero as a boy and Erwan Baynaud as a teenager)
in 1946. After arriving at the Ukrainian port of Odessa, however,
Alexei was initially separated from his French wife. As a
physician, he was seen as useful to the state; his wife, however,
was accused of being a spy, her French passport was torn up,
but she was then released after some rough treatment to her
husband, who insisted on remaining with her. All the rest
of the disembarking émigrés were shot as spies, though their
only crime was that they were old. The family then was assigned
to Kiev, where they were lodged in a tiny room within a small
house. When they finally reached their assigned lodging, both
parents broke down, realizing that they had made a big mistake
in going to the Soviet Union. They vowed to escape. But how?
The rest of the film deals with the way in which the two parents
coped with harsh conditions while trying to bide their time
to find a path of escape. For Alexei, the route was to curry
favor with the authorities, including sleeping with strategically-placed
women as needed, and to join the Communist Party. Marie befriended
and slept with a youthful swimming athlete, Sasha (played
by Sergei Bodrov, Jr.), hoping that he would defect during
an athletic competition in the West, so that he would alert
authorities in France to her plight as a French citizen wanting
to return home. Indeed, in order to free himself and to aid
her, he swam several miles from Odessa to board a Turkish
freighter, and thereafter he went to France. The inevitable
rescue in the film was orchestrated by a leftist French performer
Gabrielle Develay (played by Catherine Deneuve), who timed
an escape while she was on tour in Sofia, Bulgaria, and Marie
was simultaneously on tour with a Soviet army chorus, accompanied
by Seryozha. Alexei was then punished -- sent to a Gulag in
Sakhalin. However, he finally joined his family in France
in 1987 by obtaining an exit visa during the era of Mikhail
Gorbachëv, according to titles at the end. The movie is gripping
but not based on a true story. As is common in escape films,
the suspense keeps the eyes of filmviewers riveted on the
screen. Nevertheless, we revisit many horrors of the Soviet
system -- summary executions on mere suspicion, police brutality,
middle-of-the-night arrests and subsequent disappearances,
internal exile for suspected dissidents, KGB stoolpigeons,
denouncements for being anti-Soviet on minor pretexts, the
black market, squalid living conditions, unsafe working conditions,
long hours of work, harsh treatment for minor infractions,
alcoholism, and most of all lack of interpersonal civility.
For those nostalgic for the days when the Soviet government
provided everyone employment, food, and shelter, East-West
is an effective antidote. For Wargnier, who won a Political
Film Society award for his Indochine in 1993, "East-West
is the movement, the breath of life, from one person to another
. . . Like a torch that is passed on, everyone taking care
that it isn't put out but ready to give it up as long as they
know that it burns in someone else's heart." MH
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